Online report of the Progressive Review. For 52 years, the news while there's still time to do something about it.

January 4, 2016

The real Donald Trump

Sam Smith – Beginning with Jack Kennedy the major media began covering some of our national leaders as if they were movie stars. Fortunately, Kennedy was also a good politician but when a real movie star, Ronald Reagan, began rising, fantasy swallowed fact in the major media.

And it didn’t stop there. There was, for example, no solid political reason why Bill Clinton should have been chosen as the Democrats’ president in 1992. It was an idea fostered in no small part by a group of reactionary party members who wanted to reverse 60 years of progress by the New Deal and the Great Society. But the media quickly bought into it, turning the Clintons into stars for whom any criticism was labelled part of a vast right wing conspiracy. The fact that Clinton had governed one of most corrupt and drug trade infested states was almost universally ignored.

The same was true with Barack Obama. One needed to look no further than some of his positions and some of his major backers to understand that he was not the liberals’ dream but a clever man willing to make whatever compromises were necessary to get himself ahead.

So it should come as no surprise that Donald Trump has risen so easily. It is, among other things, far less work to cover a candidate as a star than as a person with a real record that is told and evaluated. It is so much easier to report as though one was on E! News than working for a serious news publication.

Thus we find ourselves in the remarkable situation where the leading candidate in each major party is also considered the most untrustworthy and where Donald Trump has gotten to the top without doing a single thing of significance for those other than himself.

Here are a few other things most of the media hasn’t told you about Donald Trump even though he’s gotten more coverage than all the other candidates:

While Trump did have a big head start — his father, Fred, was a multimillionaire New York real estate developer — there’s no doubt The Donald has created a fortune of his own. But if he’d stopped working 30 years ago, he could have done much better. All he had to do was shift away from real estate and park his money in … an unmanaged stock index fund.

In July, he issued a press release announcing his net worth at $10 billion. Fine. Let’s give him the benefit of the doubt and assume his net worth is $10 billion. Trump was on the Forbes 400 in 1982, when the magazine published its first annual list of America’s wealthiest denizens. That year, Forbes said Trump’s fortune was “estimated at over $200 million,” but also acknowledged that Trump claimed it was “$500 million,” according to Timothy L. O’Brien’s book “TrumpNation: The Art of Being The Donald.”

Let’s give Trump the benefit of the doubt and assume he was worth $500 million in 1982. Imagine Trump had retired in 1982, sold his real estate holdings and invested his $500 million in the S&P 500 — that is, 500 stocks representing the American stock market. From 1982 through the end of 2014, the S&P 500 index had an annualized return, including reinvested dividends, of 11.86 percent….That means Trump’s initial $500 million would have grown to $20 billion. That’s twice what Trump says he’s worth today.

Trump’s approach is based in part on religious hustlers like Norman Vincent Peale. A 1983 NY Times profile described Peale as Trump’s “pastor” and “family minister.” Here’s a revealing quote from a 1955 Nation article by psychiatrist R. C. Murphy:

With saccharine terrorism, Mr. Peale refuses to allow his followers to hear, speak or see any evil. For him real human suffering does not exist; there is no such thing as murderous rage, suicidal despair, cruelty, lust, greed, mass poverty, or illiteracy. All these things he would dismiss as trivial mental processes which will evaporate if thoughts are simply turned into more cheerful channels. This attitude is so unpleasant it bears some search for its real meaning … A person turns his eyes away from human bestiality and the suffering it evokes only if he cannot stand to look at it. By doing so he affirms the evil to be absolute, he looks away only when he feels that nothing can be done about it ... 'Evil' means 'that which must be attacked ... ' Between races for instance, this belief leads to prejudice. In child-rearing it drives parents into trying to obliterate rather than trying to nurture one or another area of the child's emerging personality ... In international relationships it leads to war. As soon as a authority endorses our capacity for hatred, either by refusing to recognize unpleasantness in the style of Mr Peale or in the morreligious e classical style of setting up a nice comfortable Satan to hate, it lulls our struggles for growth to a standstill.”

Trump has had repeated problems with the law, as outlined by Wikipedia:

Four of Trump's businesses have declared Chapter 11 bankruptcy. According to a report by Forbes in 2011, these were the result of over-leveraged hotel and casino businesses in Atlantic City… Trump said "I've used the laws of this country to pare debt. … We'll have the company. We'll throw it into a chapter. We'll negotiate with the banks. We'll make a fantastic deal. You know, it's like on The Apprentice. It's not personal. It's just business."

The first of Trump's corporate entities to file bankruptcy was in 1991, when Trump Taj Mahal was unable to pay its obligations. Forbes indicated that this first bankruptcy was the only one where Trump's personal financial resources were involved. Time, however, maintains that $72 million of his personal money was also involved in a later 2004 bankruptcy.

On November 2, 1992, the Trump Plaza Hotel filed a prepackaged Chapter 11 protection plan. Under the plan, Trump agreed to give up a 49 percent stake in the luxury hotel to Citibank and five other lenders. In return Trump would receive more favorable terms on the remaining $550+ million owed to the lenders, and retain his position as chief executive, though he would not be paid and would not have a role in day-to-day operations.

Over the course of his career, Trump has initiated and been the target of "hundreds" of civil lawsuits, which his lawyer Alan Garten said in 2015 was "a natural part of doing business in this country".In 1973, the Justice Department filed suit against the Trump Management Corporation for alleged racial discrimination, which Trump's company disputed. The case was settled out of court in 1975.

In 1990, after an analyst at Janney Montgomery Scott said that Trump's Taj Mahal project would initially "break records" but would fail before the end of that year, Trump threatened to sue the firm unless the analyst recanted or was fired. The analyst refused to retract the statements, and was fired by his firm. Taj Mahal declared bankruptcy for the first time in November 1990. A defamation lawsuit by the analyst against Trump for $2 million was settled out of court. The analyst's statements regarding the Taj Mahal's prospects were later called "stunningly accurate".

In 2009, Trump was sued by investors who had put down deposits, typically $200,000–$300,000 per person, for condos in the failed Trump Ocean Resort Baja Mexico. The investors alleged that Trump (whose videos promoting the development had been shown to potential investors) misrepresented his role in the project, stating after its failure that he had been little more than a spokesperson for the entire venture, disavowing any financial responsibility for the debacle. Investors were abruptly informed that they would be getting nothing back: "All that remains of Trump Baja is a highway billboard with a large photo of Donald Trump that advertises condos for sale. It hovers over a closed sales center and showroom, a paved parking lot, a big hole that cuts a wide swath, drainage pipes and construction equipment", reported the Associated Press in 2009.

Trump sued comedian Bill Maher for $5 million in 2013, based on comments Maher made on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno, in which Maher offered $5 million payable to a charity if Trump produced his birth certificate to prove his mother had not mated with an orangutan. (Trump, in addition to having previously challenged Obama to produce his birth certificate, had offered $5 million payable to a charity of Obama's choice, if Obama produced his college applications, transcripts, and passport records.) Trump produced his birth certificate, filing a lawsuit after Maher was not forthcoming, claiming Maher's $5 million offer was legally binding. "I don't think he was joking", Trump said. "He said it with venom." Maher replied that Trump needed to learn the difference between "what a joke is and what a contract is" and that the U.S. legal system is "not a toy for rich idiots to play with", and said that it was obvious humans and orangutans can't reproduce. Trump withdrew his lawsuit against the comedian after eight weeks.

In 2013, a lawsuit filed by New York Attorney GeneralEric Schneiderman accused Trump of defrauding more than 5,000 people of $40 million for the opportunity to learn Trump's real estate investment techniques in a for-profit training program, Trump University, which operated from 2005 to 2011. Schneiderman contended that Trump's seminars constituted an "unlicensed, illegal educational institution" which utilized false advertising, bait-and-switch tactics, intentional misrepresentation and other fraudulent practices. In January 2014, a New York Superior Court upheld part of the Attorney General's case against Trump, and in October 2014, found Trump liable for not obtaining a license to operate the for-profit investment school, Trump Entrepreneur Initiative, formerly known as Trump University. (Trump ultimately stopped using the term "University" following a 2010 order from New York regulators, who called Trump's use of the word "misleading and even illegal")

Trump also filed a $1 million defamation suit against former Trump University student Tarla Makaeff, who had spent about $37,000 on seminars, after she joined the class action lawsuit and publicized her classroom experiences on social media. Unable to prove malice, Trump University lost an anti-SLAPP lawsuit (under statutes designed to thwart legal intimidation of class action participants) and was ordered by a U.S. District Judge in April 2015 to pay Makaeff and her lawyers $798,774.24 in legal fees and costs.

These are things that even a conservative voter who hates abortion, food stamps and Barack Obama might find of concern.

SAY IT AGAIN, SAM

ABOUT THE EDITOR

The Review is edited by Sam Smith, who covered Washington under nine presidents, has edited the Progressive Review and its predecessors since 1964, wrote four books, been published in five anthologies, helped to start six organizations (including the DC Humanities Council, the national Green Party and the DC Statehood Party), was a plaintiff in three successful class action suits, served as a Coast Guard officer, and played in jazz bands for four decades.

ABOUT THE REVIEW

Regularly ahead of the curve, the Review has opposed federal drug policy for over 40 years, was a lonely media voice against the massive freeways planned for Washington, was an early advocate of bikeways and light rail, and helped spur the creation of the DC Statehood Party and the national Green Party,

In November 1990 it devoted an entire issue to the ecologically sound city and how to develop it. The article was republished widely.

Even before Clinton's nomination we exposed Arkansas political scandals that would later become major issues. .

We reported on NSA monitoring of U.S. phone calls in the 1990s, years before it became a major media story.

In 2003 editor Sam Smith wrote an article for Harper's comprised entirely of falsehoods about Iraq by Bush administration officials.

The Review started a web edition in 1995 when there were only 27,000 web sites worldwide. Today there are over 170 million active sites.

In 1987 we ran an article on AIDS. It was the first year that more than 1,000 men died of the disease.

In the 1980s, Thomas S Martin predicted in the Review that "Yugoslavia will eventually break up" and that "a challenge to the centralized soviet state" would occur as a result of devolutionary trends. Both happened.

In the 1970s we published a first person account of a then illegal abortion.

In 1971 we published our first article in support of single payer universal health care